New York City’s Perfect Storm
FAIR Take | July 2023
The late Richard Lamm, who served three terms as governor of Colorado and an equally long stint on FAIR’s board of advisors, often warned that ideas and policies that were appropriate to one age often prove disastrous in another.
Eric Adams can certainly relate. New York City’s mayor is now grappling with the perfect storm of two outdated policies: A federal refugee and asylum law that was designed for the Cold War era, and a 1979 consent decree, Callahan v. Carey, that obligates the city to provide shelter to homeless men. (Subsequent lawsuits expanded that obligation to include anyone in the five boroughs who needs a place to sleep.)
The Refugee Act of 1980 established the framework for political asylum in the United States. The law provides that anyone who arrives in the United States or at our border may seek asylum if they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their homeland. That was great, so long as it applied to the occasional Soviet ballerina or Czech tennis prodigy who managed to sneak away from their hotel rooms in the dead of night. It was a public relations coup for us – demonstrating the superiority of Western democracy over Soviet bloc totalitarianism – and an embarrassment for commissars in bad suits in the Kremlin.
In 1980, the bad guys generally tried to prevent their malcontents from leaving. However, in 2023, corrupt, despotic, and incompetent regimes are more than happy to see them go, relieving them of the need to clean up their acts and often creating a steady flow of remittances to bolster their anemic economies. Throw in the Biden administration’s sabotage of all manner of immigration and border enforcement, and, as of January, there were more than 2 million pending asylum cases in the U.S.
In New York City, our outdated federal law has met the city’s outdated legal agreements, and the results are catastrophic. The plaintiffs in Callahan v. Carey requested that the city make 750 beds available to accommodate the homeless – not a particularly heavy lift for a city of 8 million people. Today, the city is sheltering more than 100,000 people on any given night in established shelters, school gyms, church basements, and luxury hotels. That staggering figure is double what it was just two years ago, and about half of the people in the shelters are recently arrived asylum-seekers.
Plenty of other cities also designate themselves as sanctuaries for illegal aliens, but none comes even close to matching the influx of migrants that New York has seen over the past two years. In addition to understanding just how easily they can take advantage of our outdated asylum laws (exacerbated by reckless Biden administration policies), migrants are savvy enough to know where their needs will be best met.
As the now hackneyed saying goes, we are a nation of laws. But when laws no longer serve the common good, or common sense for that matter, they need to change. As Thomas Jefferson observed more than 200 years ago, “A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.”
As a moral nation, we have an obligation to offer protection to those who truly deserve it. We do not have an obligation to preserve a law that was designed for a bygone era and is being widely abused today. We have an obligation to protect the most vulnerable in our society, but we cannot commit ourselves to open-ended promises. As Mayor Adams can attest, we are on the precipice of sacrificing “life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them.”